Eric Chartre

A little bit about myself. I work as a software architect/lead developer for a large telecommunication company in Canada (my opinions expressed on this Web site are my own). I also have a broad experience with software usability.

I've been a very heavy user of wikis for the last 7 years mainly for internal projects - my team writes all of our software development documents in wikis (FlexWiki, MediaWiki, TWiki, TikiWiki, TRAC, XWiki, etc.). I'm also working really hard to install and implement wikis in my clients' organizations especially in their software development environments.

One of my goal is that humans use only one type of markups to write text quickly and efficiently for blogs, wikis, newsgroups, emails, readme files, ... The SGML family is great for structured or semi structured documents/data but it sucks when you have to write plain old text files with formatting by hand.

So, to give back to the community, I want to contribute a little to this wonderful effort.

If you want to contact me personally, you can write me at echartre at gmail dot com

What I like about Creole is that it could be the One Ring to Rule Them All (just kidding)! Seriously, with the broad support from wiki developers, it could be this spec that makes the unification possible in the long run. If we could get OLPC involved (CrossMark), it would be another great asset.

IMHO, the specification should not include any rendering i.e. (X)HTML suggestions. It should express the meaning of the markup accompanied by a very precise syntax.

My general position is to keep the standard as simple but as rich as possible for the user, two goals that are somewhat opposite, while minimizing the effect on existing WikiMLs. It should allow for a variety of writing styles so it can be accepted quickly.